"Santorum is a sexual neologism for a "frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex," and was proposed by American humorist and sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in 2003 to "memorialize" then-Republican U.S. Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania due to the controversy over his statements on homosexuality.[1] Savage asked his readers to submit new definitions for the term.[1] The word became a successful Google bomb when Savage created a website for it, which unseated the Senator's official website as the top search result for his surname on the Google web search engine.[2][3]On February 21, 2011, Stephen Colbert proposed that the definition be changed." Click here to spread Santorum.

* And other related spheres.

2 comments:

Heh, I just got done saying how I'm through with Kanazawa, but I thought it was pretty clear he was making a reductio ad absurdum argument against the Second Amendment. Sherkat made a similar point not that long ago, that the Second Amendment is pretty freakin' unambiguous, and that if we were really serious about adhering to the written law, we would have to eliminate all legislation relating to gun control, or control of any type of weapon; or we would have to repeal the Second Amendment. I don't see any flaw in this logic, only the plain pragmatic objection that of course we are not going to actually repeal it any time soon, and we need to regulate guns, say nothing of nuclear arsenals... so we're just going to look the other way and pretend the Second Amendment says something other than what it plainly states.

That's how I interpreted Kanazawa's remarks. At least I hope that's what he meant!

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.